Tag Archives: heavy metal

Although Soundwave was actually a month ago I’ve been meaning to write a little review of the day, just haven’t had the time. The bill for this years’ festival was pretty astonishing, Slipknot, SOAD, Limp Bizkit, Manson, LOG, Machine Head, Trivium, Mastodon and many, many more. I checked out a few bands on the day, but I did sadly miss one of the bands I was looking forward to the most, Steel Panther. Alter Bridge were pretty good and were the first band I saw on the day, but I don’t really know their music that well so I wandered over to the metal stage to see who else was playing. It was Meshugga. No doubt Meshugga is an intense band and genre breaking, but I don’t really get it. Nothing about their music really reaches out and grabs me so I wandered some more, saw some fairly lame emo/punk bands then came back to the metal stage to check out In Flames. They are another band who I have been aware of for some time, but havent really listened to their music that closely. Check out my post about their awesome restaurant over at Swedish Metal Restaurant.

After In Flames came on one of my favourite bands, Trivium. This would be the 4th time I have seen Trivium live and I’ve liked them since the Crusade album.They always put on a great show and kicking their set off with their latest album opener In Waves went down very well with the crowd. The next highlight for me was seeing Mastodon, who are managed by my good friend Rick Sales’ company. Rick being there meant we could watch their set from side of stage which was fantastic, they put on a great show. Also, whilst they were playing I was chatting with Willie and John from the mighty Lamb Of God. We had met previously so it was cool to see them again and have a quick chat.

After Mastodon’s set we went back to the dressing room area to chat with the guys, all really cool although I didn’t meet Brent. I have to say also that they are probably one of the tallest bands in metal, true. Chatting with Brann Dailor, drummer for Mastodon and IMHO one of the best drummers in the world right now was super cool. Brann is a very down to earth guy and we hit it off straight away talking about beer. Turns out he is a massive craft beer fan and by the sounds of it a bit of a beer geek like me. Rick told the guys about what we were doing with the wine project and about what we are talking about in regards to beer, so instantly Brann and I started talking beer. It was funny watching the others look at us like we were talking another language and just walk off and leave us to it. I don’t want to ramble on too much here about this but it was very cool to meet someone who had the same taste in beer as I did, who also happens to play drums in one of the coolest bands in metal.

My final and perhaps biggest highlight for the day was seeing the amazing and quite definitely mental Slipknot from the side of stage. I managed to score a special Slipknot Stage Access pass from *cough* Marilyn Manson’s manager *cough*, because without this you were not allowed on the stage area whilst they played. Standing stage left pretty close to Clown and Sid watching them go mental and put on an amazing show was something to behold. The crowd was sick, the band sounded better than ever and I was standing right next to Randy from LOG who was taking pictures the whole time, who also happened to be next to Dave McClain, drummer for Machine Head. It really doesn’t get much more amazing than that for a metal fan like myself. Truly a brilliant day.
I am hopeful that I’ll be able to pull together a brewing/beer project with Mastodon in the future. I plan to reach out to Brann and try to get some feedback and ideas from him, would be really cool I reckon. If you have any ideas/thoughts/musings about a cool beer style that you think would suit Mastodon then please leave a comment and let us know.

Well, that’s quite an essay I would say. Until next time, may your music be LOUD!!

I found this video over at Matt Heafy’s blog kiichichaos.com and I was pretty excited by it. Check out this cool vid of Matt and Anders from Swedish metallers In Flames eating at In Flames’ own restaurant in Gothenburg, Sweden called 2112.

Having followed Matt’s blog for a little while now I know how much of a foodie he is and likes good wine and beer too, plus he’s a rally cool guy. I think it is amazing that the guys from In Flames have opened their own pub/restaurant in their hometown, it really reflects my own goals with Distorted beverages. I’ve had in my mind from the beginning to be able to have a tasting room/bar/pub which served all of our beverages plus great craft beer and premium small producer wines from around the world with really great food. Hopefully that dream will eventually be realised but first things first, I need to get our products out in the marketplace.

On that front, things are moving in the right direction if a little more slowly than I would like, but in the next week or so everything will be much clearer. The Soundwave festival is also starting in Brisbane this weekend and will be here in Adelaide next weekend. It will be a great opportunity for me to meet up with some people I’ve met before and to meet for the first time so other cool musicians. Top of my list are in no particular order:

Machine Head

Mastodon

Steel Panther

Times of Grace

Zakk Wylde

So, there is a lot going on right now and I will have more updates soon.

Well, I haven’t lived up to my promise in my last post to write more often, but it has been a very hectic Christmas & New Year season. Hope you all had a great time spent with family and friends, good music and good booze!

When I started writing this blog my vision for what I would be doing was quite strong and well-formed but as you do, I had small doubts as to whether it would all come together or not. 12 months ago following a phone call from Rick Sales, manager extraordinaire, my brain started racing with ideas and concepts as to what we could create and the potential to really be innovative and creative, whilst just doing something cool. It has taken that full 12 months and little bit more to get to the stage where an actual company and physical presence is being realised. Distorted Beverages is now trademarked, domain names locked in and a registered business name. The company structure has been decided and within the next month we will be an official Australian company. It’s amazing to see what I have dreamed of finally actually happening, amazing and scary at the same time.

There has been many discussions with Rick and Barry over at Global and with the help of some new and fantastic friends here I have been able to make my vision a reality. What this means in actuality is that in the coming Autumn we will be releasing Motorhead Shiraz onto the Australian drinking public closely followed by Motorhead Vodka. We are in negotiations with the largest independent group of liquor stores in the country and so far the response has been good. It is now up to yours truly to get out there and rally stores behind our concept, a hard rock section in every store. In reality that is what I want to achieve, having a selection of beer, wines and spirits with their own shelf area in each of the stores and what better way to start than with the mighty Motorhead!

My vision though doesn’t stop there. I have a lot of big ideas and dreams/visions/goals/whatever for where this company can go and I am very adamant that it will be a great success. That doesn’t mean there aren’t nights where I lay in bed not able to sleep thinking “Can I really do this?”. That happens more than I would like, but the only way I will fail is to give in to those doubts. I have already achieved things I wasn’t sure were possible, met some amazing people and we are only just getting started.

I really do promise to write again very soon. The other angle of this story is my brewing collaboration with Dan Donegan from Disturbed which is really starting to move in the right direction; very, very cool.

A while back I wrote a piece about the Motorhead wine that was being sold throughout Scandinavia for the past year or so. Some of you may also be aware that the wine is also now available in Germany and the UK and I’m proud to announce that yours truly will be launching the wine here in Australia in early 2012! i can’t truly express how awesome it is to be involved in a project with a rock icon, one of the original heavy metal bands and a group that has been so influential on hard rock and metal for the past 30 some odd years! To make sure I’m truly in the mood whilst writing this post I am of course listening to the deluxe edition of Ace of Spades, such a great album.

This is really just the beginning for Distorted Beverages, which by the way is now an official registered business, which is nice. I had a great conversation with Barry Drinkwater from Global Merchandise this past weekend. Barry is top bloke, very experienced in the merchandising field for the entertainment industry and it’s a privilege to work with someone like him. We have plenty of ideas flowing about promotional concepts and future artists and products that we can launch and I’m really excited to get my teeth stuck into it.

The last piece of the puzzle is the retailers here in Australia. In order to make the biggest impact and reach as many people and fans as possible I have been in discussions with one of the big liquor retail chains here. Whilst they haven’t come onboard 100% yet, they haven’t said no either so we are negotiating on things like price and quantity, all the fun stuff. not my favourite part of the job but a very important one and a very good learning experience anyway.

In the meantime dear readers please check out the Motorhead Wine website, follow it on all your favourite social media sites and lets enjoy this together with the music turned up LOUD!

I’m going to see Foo Fighters in about a week or so, think I may have scored some passes as well, so next time I’ll be reporting about that. Until then….

Like this:

I have to apologise for being so slack and not having posted anything for the past couple of weeks, no excuses but there hasn’t been a lot to update either so i though i would wait until I had some actual news/updates.
So, last week I got an email from a lovely chap from a brew pub in Chicago. i had been putting out the proverbial feelers the past few weeks/months to find a brewing partner for myself and Mr Dan Donegan. I don’t remember if I mentioned this previously but Dan approached me about making a beer together and I of course said yes. What I’ve been trying to do since then is work out how to actually pull it off. I had been looking around for some info or contacts in the US brewing scene and in then end just sent out some cold emails and finally got a response. I was about to give up any hope of getting a lead but finally received one. I called Dan about it on Friday and we spoke for a bit and he was quite keen, so he will check out the brew pub and see what it is like and we’ll then decide if we should go further and create a collaboration brew with these guys. I’m deliberately being rather vague on specifics, such as the name of the brew pub, becaus ei’d rather wait until we have something more concrete before rushing out and making grandious announcements.

In wine news, I had another meeting with the winemakers and I’ve got some sample bottles of Cabernet and Shiraz at the price we are looking at. Labels and cartons are well along now and I just need to finalise some capsules and we are cooking.

I’ll announce more soon however and I promise to post more often in the coming weeks.

There is a great blog post here from Kev Brock about why Metallica deserves the respect they have/should have. I’m a long time Metallica fan, who has meat the band on a couple of occasions, once as a fan at a Meet & Greet and the second time last year at their Adelaide show as a guest and then was priviledged to be invited to their private end of tour party in Melbourne. They were warm, welcoming and very friendly guys an attitude that permeated through their whole organisation. I wish I could have been at the Yankee Stadium Big 4 show, it would have been epic.

Swedish viking metallers Amon Amarth and Indiana’s 3 Floyds brewing have announced the release of an imperial/strong porter called Ragnarok. Taking a look at the cover of their album Twilight of the Thunder Gods you can see that it is quite an appropriate name. My friend Stone over at Metal Odyssey has a great review of this album, here.

New Belgium brewing company also announced that they are due to release their latest beer in their Lips of Faith series with hard-rockers Clutch. The beer is described as a 9%ABV dark, sour ale with the brewery describing it as “A pronounced bass line of dark chocolate, coffee and black malts bridge the sourness of our dark wood ale for a fluid riff.”